The Glorious Sovereign: Thomas Hobbes on Leadership and International Relations

Thomas Hobbes lived to the ripe old age of 91, an impressive achievement for one who lived in the most dangerous of times.1 His long and eventful life coincided with one of the most turbulent and perilous periods in English history, marked by the execution of Charles I, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, and finally the Stuart Restoration. It is perhaps this fact, above all, that explains Hobbes’s abiding interest in securing the stability of the state, even to the neglect of international relations. From his very first writing, a translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, to his major political works, such as Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642), and Leviathan (1651), to the posthumously published Dialogues (1681) and Behemoth (1682), his overriding concern was overcoming civil war and internal instability. This view gains some support from Hobbes himself. At the very end of his most well-known work, Leviathan, Hobbes states that having completed his “Discourse of Civill and Ecclesiasticall Government, occassioned by the disorders of the present time,” he will “return to my interrupted Speculation of Bodies Naturall; wherein (if God give me health to finish it,) I hope the Novelty will as much please, as in the Doctrine of this Artificiall Body it useth to offend.”2 From this account, it seems that Hobbes is primarily a political philosopher of domestic politics and only incidentally and indirectly a student of international relations.3